Metabonomics Study on the Subtypes of Rheumatoid Arthritis
类风湿性关节炎疾病分型的血浆代谢组学研究

Modern medicine and traditional Chinese medicine offer different perspectives regarding the diseases. The development of systems biology provides an opportunity for the integration of these two medicine systems. In this study, an UPLC-TOF-MS based plasma metabonomics approach combined with multivariate data analysis was applied for the investigation of subtypes of rheumatoid arthritis. With principal component analysis (PCA), the control group and disease group were separated clearly. Furthermore, the subtypes of rheumatoid arthritis diagnosed based on modern medicine (active stage and stable stage) and traditional Chinese medicine (hot syndrome and cold syndrome) were revealed by partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) together with orthogonal signal correction (OSC). This study suggests that metabonomics approach might be used as a promising tool for investigation of the scientific essence of the traditional Chinese medicine.